


The Purloined Letter

by PlaidAdder



Series: Missing Pages [19]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: M/M, Mycroft Being a Good Brother, Mycroft-centric, Story: The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-15 18:39:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14795841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: My dear Uncle,Enclosed you will find a fair copy, which I have written out on my own time and at the request of Mr. Mycroft Holmes, of a letter written to you on the 3rd of this month by a Mr. Andrew Moriarty. In the letter, Mr. Moriarty refers to a cash payment made by you, to him, as an advance for 'the Cornwall job,' to wit, the planned assassination by Mr. Moriarty or his agents of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. The cash advance is not enclosed.*****Percy Phelps writes a letter to his uncle, Lord Holdhurst. It's a howler.





	The Purloined Letter

Thursday, August 4, 1891

My dear Uncle,

Enclosed you will find a fair copy, which I have written out on my own time and at the request of Mr. Mycroft Holmes, of a letter written to you on the 3rd of this month by a Mr. Andrew Moriarty. In the letter, Mr. Moriarty refers to a cash payment made by you, to him, as an advance for 'the Cornwall job,' to wit, the planned assassination by Mr. Moriarty or his agents of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. The cash advance is not enclosed. 

I have made six fair copies. The other five have been deposited in safe places. The original is retained by Mr. Mycroft Holmes, though he wishes me to inform you that it is not retained on his person, in his rooms, or at the Diogenes Club. Anticipating that you might wish to know how Mr. Mycroft Holmes came into possession of the original, Mr. Mycroft Holmes has given me leave to inform you that Mr. Moriarty's confidential secretary, on his way to post Mr. Moriarty's letter to you, accidentally collided with Mr. Mycroft Holmes. In the process of helping the secretary to his feet and helping collect his things, Mr. Mycroft substituted for the original an envelope he himself had prepared shortly after your interview, using Mr. Moriarty's stationery (samples of which Mr. Mycroft took the opportunity to conceal inside his top hat), and addressed in something very like Mr. Andrew Moriarty's hand (which he had learned to counterfeit by closely observing Mr. Moriarty's signature on public documents relating to the operation of the Plymouth railway station), to you (because he had mentioned both your name and Lord Bellinger's name to Mr. Moriarty and observed from his involuntary responses that it was his relations with you--the great Lord Holdhurst!--that he particularly desired to conceal). Mr. Moriarty's confidential secretary then posted the substitute letter, and Mr. Mycroft Holmes went on his way with the original tucked inside his greatcoat. 

As you have often told me, uncle, a superior clerk retains no memory of the documents he copies. I have never achieved this level of superiority. All of the particulars of Mr. Moriarty's letter to you are now my intimate companions, for the rest of my days.

I am shocked by your conduct. I am beyond shocked. I am appalled. I am shaken to my very soul. That _you_ , uncle, should betray the trust reposed in you by Her Majesty and and Her Majesty's government by conspiring with England's greatest criminal mastermind, for the sake of mere  _money,_ is to begin with simply inconceivable to me. I am aware, of course, that our family can no longer be counted rich; and despite your reserve, I have long known of the shame you feel at being unable to make the sort of show expected of a man of your family and position. But what is money--what is social position--that it should weigh down the scale when put into the balance with honor? How can it be an acceptable bargain, uncle, to sell one's heart and soul for a coach and four and an apartment in the fashionable part of town? 

And if only that were all! Would that the shame of knowing that you conspired to help Professor Moriarty ambush the Metropolitan Police and therefore preserve his worthless life long enough to hunt down England's greatest living detective were  _all_ the pain that this letter held for me! But there is more horror. I find that, after Professor Moriarty failed to end Mr. Holmes's life at the Reichenbach Falls, you  _continued_ to pursue Mr. Holmes after Professor Moriarty's death! And to include Watson too in your bloody writ! Watson, happily, remains ignorant of what I know of your unreasonable antipathy toward him. He still believes that he was included in 'the Cornwall job' only because all parties assumed that it would be impossible to assassinate Mr. Holmes without assassinating Watson first. And though I believe this to be absolutely true, I cannot forget the coldness with which you treated him on his first and only visit to my home over the holidays. Nor can I forget the letter you wrote to me afterward, educating me about the importance of making 'connexions' at school, and all but forbidding me to continue my association with someone who, as you so memorably put it, 'can neither help you to a position nor introduce you to higher social circles.' You advised me against engaging Mr. Holmes in the search for the missing treaty, and you could never bear to hear me speak afterward of my gratitude to him and to Watson for saving my honor. Saving  _my_ honor, without which I thought I could not possibly live! How little I knew then about how you had prostituted your own!

I cannot comprehend how you could have become the person to whom that letter was written. I even wonder, now, if it was entirely  _by chance_ that Joseph happened upon my office at the very moment when I was in the act of copying a secret document of immense monetary value. If in fact you did mastermind that theft and were to receive a share of the profit, then I am doubly and trebly glad that Mr. Holmes and Watson foiled you. 

From the beginning of my friendship with Watson, you disapproved of him. Because he was a nobody, a middling little boy of mediocre talent and almost no family who could never amount to anything--or because you knew that I loved him? Did you want to kill him because he was an obstacle to your greed and because he knew of your shame--or because once, long ago at my poor mother's house, you overheard me using our schoolboy nickname for him? It was  _all_ the boys who called him Beauty, and not only me, the same way they all called me Tadpole. They meant it to be cruel; but he said he was proud of it, and I loved him for saying that, whether or not it was true. Can it be that after all these years--after my brilliant career, after my marriage to a beautiful and accomplished woman--you still hate Watson for being the first to show you that I am sensitive to beauty  _wherever_ it may abide? Is that why you have agitated, since the passage of the Act in 1885, for its stricter application to members of the middle and upper classes? Is that why you have for years held the threat of such a prosecution over the head of both Mr. Mycroft and Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Because you want to burn away everything that did not fit with your image of me, your brightest and most brilliant protege?

I will never know; but I do know this. You will resign your position and retire from public life forever. Furthermore, you will write a column for the  _Times_ recanting your public pronouncements about the importance of prosecuting 'the English vice' wherever it may lurk. Or rather, I will write it and you will copy it and sign it and send it to the  _Times._ Thirdly, you will see to it that the bill currently before the Commons proposing to expand the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act to include gross indecency between women will be withdrawn. Fourthly, you are to understand that if any scandal ever touches Mr. Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Watson, or if any harm should ever befall either of them or Mr. Mycroft Holmes, the original document will be sent to Inspector Lestrade, and the five other fair copies delivered to Lord Bellinger, Sir James Walter, the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope, the  _Times,_ and the  _Strand._ This will also be done if you fail to accomplish any of the other demands I have made within the next fourteen days.

I will know of your behavior only by report. Once you are no longer in public life, I shall never see or speak to you again. You appear to me, sir, like some sort of foul octopus whose tentacles have snaked into everything good and true in life and are slowly squeezing it to death. I turn from you in disgust, as I would from a loathsome insect or a decaying corpse. 

Your former colleague,

MR. PERCIVAL PHELPS, ESQ.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title, of course, is a reference to the classic Edgar Allan Poe story "The Purloined Letter," one of several featuring his detective C. Auguste Dupin. Poe was clearly an influence on Doyle, though he has Sherlock Holmes drag him pretty hard in _Study in Scarlet._ I should also say that this story is influenced by Derek Marlowe's adaptation of "The Greek Interpreter" for Granada, in which he has Mycroft bumping into Kemp in the train car (what train car? you ask? oh my friend, thereby hangs a tale) and stealing his revolver. We know from "Slow Burn" that Mycroft decided long ago that he was going to help Watson bring Holmes back to life; but it took Watson's letter to him in "Tempus Fugit" to actually get him off his keister and down to Plymouth to obtain this crucial piece of evidence. 
> 
> As for Percy...his family crest is now the Tadpole Rampant. Don't fuck with idealists! They have NO PITY! Since "Much to Hope For," I had been intending to bring Percy back at the end somehow, but I didn't know how to do it until after I'd written "The Cornwall Job." And I suddenly thought: Hey. Percy's whole job is to copy sensitive documents. What if Mycroft showed him Moriarty's letter and asked him to copy it? Et voila. Percy and Watson had, in my own mind anyway, the kind of romantic friendship that most readers see Holmes and Watson as having: they never Did It, but they loved each other and stood by each other. And even though now they're both committed to other people, they still think of that friendship as something beautiful and worth defending. As Lord Holdhurst finds out.
> 
> When you think about it, Mycroft's move here is kind of genius. He doesn't know whether, on the basis of this letter, he could really put Lord Holdhurst in jail. But by asking Percy to do the copying, and thus destroying Percy's affection for him, he is from a psychological point of view doing most of the damage that exposure would have done. (From a physical point of view, Holdhurst is highly motivated to avoid further exposure. Victorian prisons. Eurgh.) So that part of the plan has probably succeeded beyond Mycroft's wildest dreams.


End file.
